Friday, June 19, 2009

Ignorance on The Apology

“Even among proponents of a congressional apology, reaction to yesterday's vote was mixed. Carol M. Swain, a professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University who had pushed for the Bush administration to issue an apology, called the Democratic-controlled Senate's resolution "meaningless" since the party and federal government are led by a black president and black voters are closely aligned with the Democratic party.

"The Republican Party needed to do it," Swain said. "It would have shed that racist scab on the party."

Well, obviously, being a professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt carries no requirements for an even passing knowledge of American history. For Professor Swain and anyone who might think her resume equates to being knowledgeable about any subject she opines on, I remind all that the Republican Party was founded as an anti-slavery party. Its first nominee (1856), John Fremont, ran under the slogan “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Speech, Free Men, and Fremont”. Abraham Lincoln, its second presidential nominee, oversaw the fighting of a Civil War by a Republican-led Union against a predominantly Democratic Confederacy. There is arguably no group or organization – neither the slaves themselves nor the African tribes from which they were taken (and certainly not the Democratic Party!) – that had more to do with the end of slavery here in the U.S. than the Republican Party.

Ms. Swain has apparently made quite a career for herself as a race-baiter but an impressive list of degrees garnered by such a provocateur is no excuse for the Post to include her ignorance in their reporting.

Of course there's an excuse. You see when you report something that someone said, well, she really did say it. That's a fact, regardless of the value of what she said. And that way you can score your cheap political points, without doing it yourself.